In a few minutes the winding road down the mountain brought her to the sad outskirts of Paul's Landing, and thence to the Tracys' house. She jumped out, ran up the steps and knocked, looking about her curiously as she did so. She seldom went to the Tracys', and had forgotten how shabby and humble the place was. The discovery increased her sense of compunction and self-disapproval. How could she have forgotten that clever boy there for so long! If he had been one of her own group it would never have happened. "If there's anything I hate," she reflected, "it's seeming casual to people who live like this." And instantly she decided that one ought to devote one's whole life to the Tracys and their kind, and that to enjoy the world's goods, even in the limited and precarious way in which they were enjoyed at Eaglewood, while other lives like these were being lived at one's door, denoted a vulgarity of soul which was the last fault she would have cared to confess to. What made it worse, too, in the particular case, was the Tracys' far-off cousinship with the Lorburn family; the fact that two or three generations ago a foolish (and elderly) Lorburn virgin had run away with farmer Tracy's son, who worked in the cement factory down on the river, and being cast off by her family had dropped to the level of her husband's, with whom affairs had not gone well, and who had left his widow and children in poverty. Nowadays all this would have signified much less, as far as the family's social situation went; but in the compact life of sixty years ago it was a hopeless fall to lapse from the height of Eaglewood to the depth in which the small shopkeepers and farmers of Paul's Landing had their being. It was all wrong, Halo mused, wrinkling her young brows like her mother's in the effort to think out, then and there, while she waited for her ring to be answered, the quickest way of putting an end to such injustice.

The development of her plan was interrupted by the appearance of young Upton, who looked at her with such surprise that she felt more acutely than ever her suddenly discovered obligation toward his family.

"Oh, Upton, how are you? I know I've interrupted you at supper! I hope your mother won't be very angry with me."

"Angry—?" young Tracy echoed, bewildered. He passed the back of his hand over his mouth in the effort to conceal the fact that she had rightly suspected him of coming from supper. "I thought mebbe there was something wrong at the Willows," he said.